Hitman franchise leaves home for the first time – next title to be developed by Square Enix Montreal

IO Interactive will keep an eye on Sqeenix, make sure they don't change the franchise too much.

Despite the latest Hitman game, Hitman: Absolution only being released this week (read our review here), already there is talk of the next game in the franchise. The hot goss though, is that the game’s developer IO Interactive is passing the torch to a new studio, Square Enix Montreal, and working on a new project themselves.

Absolution‘s director Tore Blystad compared the move to a new studio to the cyclical format games like Call of Duty follow. “It’s like with Treyarch and Infinity Ward.“You have an IP that has been developed. They will feed off each other, as well as some things that stand out. I think with these big franchises it takes a long time to develop just one game. If you can, work a little bit in parallel at least and help each other out.”

“We’ve been talking about these similarities to some of the big movie franchise like Aliens, where everyone’s doing it their own way. Every time someone gets their hands on a franchise they do something different,” he said. “So rather than doing the same thing again you get another take on the character from a fresh perspective.”

“There’s a lot of these problems you encounter with these sort of productions, some of them are really fundamental problems, or they have a big effect on the game – like how you do a mechanic for instance. If you change a mechanic too much then the whole gameplay will be modified.”